Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (38 page)

Notice how your dog uses his eyes; the frenzy of his nose; how his ears fold back, prick up, and pivot toward a distant bark. Notice all the sounds he makes, and all the sounds he notices. Even the way the dog moves, an action so familiar as to make him recognizable at a distance, is transformed on closer examination: what gait does he use? A medium-sized dog may stride forward in the classic
walk,
the rear foot on one side of the body slowly chasing the front foot to the ground, the diagonal paws moving almost in sync. Hurrying a little, he
trots,
the diagonal legs now in tandem, occasionally finding himself with only one paw of four fully on the ground. Between the trot and the walk is the gait of the short-legged: typical of the bulldog, front-heavy with a wide stance, his rear end rolling as he walks. Leggy dogs do better at the
gallop,
the run of greyhounds, wherein the two rear feet precede the two front to the ground, the dog's body alternating between outstretched, and airborne and spring-loaded. In the gallop that fifth toelike digit partway up the front leg of most dogs—the dew claw—is used for stability and leverage; at a gallop's end you might find the usually clean dew claw with a dollop of mud under it. Toy-sized dogs
half-bound,
bringing their two hind legs forward at once but uncoupling their front footfalls. Other dogs
pace,
their left legs moving forward and falling at once, followed quickly by the right. Mesmerize yourself trying to keep track of the complexity of your dog's gait.

To understand what your dog's day at home without you might be like, by all means videotape it. One of the distinct pleasures I got with Pumpernickel was seeing her act without me. Despite hours of videorecording, I rarely turned my camera on to her. It was only when she didn't expect me—when a friend had taken her out, and I arrived unannounced—that I got to see her carry on without me.

It was spectacular to see. You can re-create this kind of spectacle by setting up a videotape at your home when you leave for the day. I recommend this "eavesdropping" not because it reliably reveals spectacles—it does not—but because it allows you to see your dog's life without you there. You will more fully understand what his day might be like by watching a snippet of the day pass later, minute by minute.

What I saw in my eavesdropping was Pump's independence, freed not just from the need to check back with me, but from the kind of scrutiny to which I subjected all her behavior. She existed capably without me, for the hours that I milled about in the bookstore, had an extra-long run, went elsewhere for dinner followed by elsewhere still for drinks. This was at once reassuring and fully humbling. I am glad that she managed the day on her own, yet I am sometimes mystified that I ever left her alone at all.

Most dogs are simply alone all day with little to do, expected to wait it out until we return, and then act just as we want them to. And we are surprised and horrified when they actually do something in our absence! That dogs endure this (and much worse misinterpretation and neglect) is almost part of their constitution. We can, and do, get away with it. But dogs are individuals. It is for this reason that they require—and deserve—more attention to their umwelt, to their experience, to their point of view.

Let them smell like a dog as long as you can stand it. Some dogs will even develop painful skin sores from regular bathing. And no dog wants to smell like a bathtub that has had a dog in it.

Like novice poker players, dogs reveal what could be called their "tells"—their intent, their "hand"—with every move, if you simply look. The configuration of the face, head, body, and tail are all meaningful. And there is more to it than whether the tail is wagging or the dog is barking: dogs can say more than one thing at a time. A barking dog whose tail fans the sky is not "about to attack" but is instead more curious, alert, uncertain—and interested. A furiously wagging low tail undermines the aggressiveness of a familiar dog snarling as he guards a ball.

Given the salience of eye contact to all canids, and the dog's use of gaze, you can get a lot of information about an unknown dog from his eyes. Constant eye contact can be threatening: do not approach a dog by gazing non-stop, which may be perceived as staring him down. If he is staring at you, you can deflect his gaze by turning away slightly, breaking eye contact. They do the same when they are tense: turning their head to the side, or distracting themselves with a yawn or a sudden interest in a smell on the ground. If you think you are the recipient of a threatening stare, you can confirm it by looking for its accompaniment: hackles up, ears up, tail up, body frozen. A stare with a tongue darting licks into the air is more adoring than aggressive.

If you don't have a dog yet, or are getting another dog, I have just the breed for you: the breedless dog, the mutt. The myth that a shelter dog, especially a mixed-breed dog, will be less good or less reliable than a purebred dog is not just wrong, it is entirely backward: mixed breeds are healthier, less anxious, and live longer than purebreds. When you buy a bred dog, you are simply not buying a fixed object, guaranteed to act in certain ways—regardless of what the breeder tells you. What you might get is a dog with an overriding fixation, born of breeding for a task that he will likely never do while living with you (who nonetheless will still be wonderfully doggy). Mutts, on the other hand, with the bred characteristics diluted, wind up having lots of latent abilities and less mania.

On walks Pump was never satisfied with being on one side of the path or the other: she weaved back and forth capriciously. Holding her on leash I was constantly readjusting my hand on the thing. Sometimes I'd insist she stay to one side of me, and she sighed at me while we both glanced knowingly at the good un-smelled spots on the other side.

Even with a scientific take on the dog, we find ourselves using anthropomorphic words. Our dogs—my dog—make friends, feel guilty, have fun, get jealous; understand what we mean, think about things, know better; are sad, are happy, are scared; want, love, hope.

This way of talking is easy, and sometimes useful, but it is also part of a bigger, more exceptionable phenomenon. As we recast every moment of a dog's life in human terms, we have begun to completely lose touch with the animal in them. It is no longer the rare dog who is shampooed, clothed in garments, and feted on his birthday. That may seem benign, but it is also part of a de-animalizing of dogs that is somewhat radical. We are rarely present for their births, and many people will choose not to be present for their own dogs' deaths. We eliminate sex for the most part: we neuter dogs and we discourage the slightest lascivious thrusts of the hips. They are fed sanitized food, in bowls; they are largely restricted to a leash-length distance from our heels. In cities, their excrement is bundled up and thrown away. (Happily, we have not yet taught them to use the toilet … convenient though we know that would be.) Breed types are described like products, with specified features. It seems as though we are trying to get rid of the animal part of the dog.

If we assume that we have reduced the animal factor to zero, we are in for some unhappy surprises. Dogs do not always behave just as we think they should. They may sit, lie down, and roll over—but then will revert magnificently. They suddenly squat and urinate in the house, bite your hand, sniff your crotch, jump on a stranger, eat something gnarly in the grass, don't come when you call them, roughly tackle a much smaller dog. In this way, our frustrations with dogs often arise from our extreme anthropomorphizing, which neglects the very animalness of dogs. A complex animal cannot be explained simply.

The alternative to anthropomorphizing is not simply treating animals as precisely unhuman. We now have the tools to take a more measured look at their behavior: with their umwelt and their perceptual and cognitive abilities in mind. Nor need we take a dispassionate stance toward animals. Scientists anthropomorphize … at home. They name their pets, and see love in a named-dog's upward-turned gaze. In research, names are verboten: while they might help tell animals apart, they are not benign. Naming a wild animal "colors one's thinking about it forever afterwards," a preeminent field biologist noted. There are obvious observational biases that are introduced when you name the subject of your observations. Jane Goodall famously violated this maxim, and "Graybeard" became known to the world. But "Graybeard" for me connotes a wise, old man: as a result, I may be more likely to perceive his behavior as indicative of his wisdom than see it as foolishness. Instead, to distinguish individual animals, most ethologists use identifying markings—leg bands, tags, or marking fur or feathers with dye—or look for identity in habitual behavior, social organization, or natural physical features.*

To name a dog is to begin to make him personal—and thus an anthropomorphizable creature. But we must. To name a dog is to assert an interest in understanding the nature of the dog; to not name the dog seems the pinnacle of disinterest. Dogs named
Dog
make me sad: the dog is already defined out of being a player in the owner's life.
Dog
has no name of his own; he is only a taxonomic subspecies. He will never be treated as an individual. What one is doing when naming a dog is starting him on the personality that he is to grow into. When trying out names for our dog, calling words out at her—
"Bean!" "Bella!" "Blue!"
—to see if any prompted a reaction, I felt that I was searching for "her name": the name that was already hers. With it, the bond between human and animal—wrought of understanding, not projection—could begin to form.

Go look at your dog. Go to him! Imagine his umwelt—and let him change your own.

I sometimes find deep recognition in photos of her in which her eyes were not distinguishable from the darkness of her coat. It represents to me the way in which there was always something mysterious about her existence to me: what it was like to be Pump. She never laid it out there in the open. She had a privacy about her. I feel privileged that I was let into that private realm.

Pumpernickel wagged into my life in August 1990. We spent nearly every day together, until the day of her last breaths in November 2006. I still spend every one of my days with her.

Pump was a total surprise. I didn't expect to be changed constitutionally by a dog. But it quickly became apparent that the description "a dog" didn't capture the astounding abundance of facets to her, the depth of her experience, and the possibilities of a lifetime knowing her. Before long, I felt pleasure simply at her company and pride at watching her act. She was spirited, patient, willful, and disarming all in one great furry bundle. She was sure of her opinions (she had no truck with yipping dogs) and yet open to new things (as the occasional fostered cat—despite each's unwavering disinterest). She was effusive; she was responsive; she was great fun.

What Pump was not was a subject in my research (at least, not intentionally). Still, I brought her with me when going to watch dogs. She was often my passkey into dog parks, and into dog circles: without a dog companion, a person may be treated suspiciously by dogs and owners alike. As a result, she wanders through many of my videos of bouts of play—through and out, as my video camera was trained on my unwitting subjects, not on my Pump. Now I regret my camera's unemotional oversight of her. Though I captured the social interactions I wanted, and was eventually, after much reviewing and analysis of the behaviors of the interactants, able to discover some surprising abilities of dogs, I missed some moments of
my
dog.